Data transmission or communications between two electrical devices or components often occurs over a network called a “bus.” A bus interconnects two or more devices or components and allows signals to be sent and/or received by one or more devices connected to the bus. The bus system generally functions according to a protocol, standard, or predetermined design.
One such bus system is a two-wire serial bus. For example, an inter-integrated circuit (I2C) bus is a two-wire serial bus. A simplified two-wire serial bus system 100 is shown in FIG. 1. The two-wire serial bus system typically includes a master device 102 interconnected with one or more slave devices 104, 106, and 108. The master device 102 can send data or messages to or receive data or messages from the slave devices 104, 106, and 108 via the bus 110. Generally, the master device 102 controls all communications on the two-wire serial bus system 100.
Unfortunately, two-wire serial bus systems, such as the two-wire serial bus system 100 in FIG. 1, often require complicated designs to implement a multi-master bus, which is a bus that has two or more master devices controlling the bus. In addition, many applications, such as network equipment that connects a router line card to a gigabit interface converter, for example, gigabit interface converters (GBIC), small form factor pluggable (SFP) converters, and XFP converters, only allow a single master-slave configuration and do not support a multi-master bus.